I agree with your specific assessments here, but I was trying to get at the question of whether there are meaningful and measurable differences in the broad-sca

I agree with your specific assessments here, but I was trying to get at the question of whether there are meaningful and measurable differences in the broad-scale accessibility of e.g. whitespace-centric syntax vs lispy syntax vs curly-brace syntax. Admittedly, it's hard to tease this apart from the standard library and communal conventions of any given language: Java occasionally devolving into an endless sequence of ProducerFactoryFactory.newProducerFactory().initializeProducerBuilder(new ProducerBuilder())... certainly impacts its readability in a practical sense, just as the Haskell community's perhaps ill-advised love of point-free programming and highest-order polymorphism doesn't always do it favors on the readability front. Those sort of details seem like they'd really complicate a rigorous and systematic study, but on the other hand, lacking a good methodology has never stopped _other_ supposed quantitative studies of programming languages as they relate to e.g. "developer productivity" and "defect rates," so who's to say...